Morphology is the study of the smallest meaningful elements in language. The goal of this course is to introduce the basic morphological concepts that are used to describe and explain the internal structure of words in a cross-linguistic fashion. What is special about Arabic or Hindi plural formation, how are concepts of vowel harmony applied to languages such as Finnish or Hungarian, does Mandarin Chinese inflect its words at all?
This course will take a critical look at the theoretical notions that have been developed to account for these and other phenomena encountered in word structure. We will apply these notions to the analysis of as many languages as possible inlcuding the methods of linguistic fieldwork using the fieldwork classes of the Virtual Linguistics Campus.
- Teacher: Antonia Eisermann
This modules in this repository introduce various topics related to the study of meaning:
- Word Semantics - How words relate to the world and to other words of a language
- Sentence Semantics - How the meanings of sentences can be specified
- Pragmatics - How people use language and with what effects
- Meaning Acquisition - How children learn the meanings of words
- Computational Semantics - How machines handle meaning
- Cognitive Semantics - How meaning relates to the cognitive abilities of humans
- Historical Semantics - How meanings change over time
